What is Page Authority and How it Affects your Ranking?

What makes a product the best selling one? It is the number of people who buy it and recommend it to others.

Similarly, what makes a webpage the top-ranked one? It is the number of webmasters that recommend it through backlinks.

That’s the whole concept of page authority contained in a few lines.

Do you want to increase your website’s ranking but are unaware of your website’s current worth?

You should first understand the concept of page authority. Read the analogy below:

You and I live in a consumer-driven world where the vendors intelligently prioritize the utilities according to our needs.

High authority webpages are like the most selling brands and Google is like a gigantic superstore.

When you enter a superstore, you notice the best products in no time. You do not struggle with finding the desired products.

Just as the trusted products are indexed on the front of the shelves to value the customers' demand, the best web pages are given the top position in search results to serve the searchers.

How would you define page authority?

You can understand page authority as a score that defines your webpage’s position when someone searches for it. If your score is high that means your page will rank high. In other words, it tells the worth of your website.

Moz developed importance of domain athourity and page authority in the form of scores starting from 1 to 100. The number close to zero shows low and the number near 100 hints to high page authority.

Moz uses machine learning to develop algorithms that index your web pages based on several factors of which linking profile is the prominent one.

What is high or low page authority?

Your page authority is a relative term because its value depends upon your competitor’s page authority score.

Suppose your competitor has a page authority of 60 and you have got 61, then you have high page authority. And if it’s less than 60, then you have low page authority.

In short, you have to get a slight upper hand on your competitor to get a high page authority.

Moreover, they do not guarantee that your page will appear if someone searches for your required data because google doesn’t consider it a ranking factor.

Hence, it doesn’t remain stagnant but changes with respect to the algorithms and the competition.

How does PA relate to DA?

Differences:

• Page authority predicts individual page ranking in search engine results.
• Domain authority predicts the entire domain or subdomain ranking in search engine results.

Similarities:

• Both DA and PA are calculated by the same factors.
• Both explain your overall website’s SEO and linking profile.

How to find page authority?

Several tools will help you check DA PA. These tools are specifically designed to track down your website page authority and domain authority as well.

First, it was developed by Moz, but now a lot of SEO tools providers allow you to get PA of a specific page of your website.

You just have to put the URL in the search box and click on the button that represents the result. In this way, you may find the page authority of your website’s pages.

Does page authority affect your SEO and page ranking?

There might not be any direct impact on Seo and in turn your ranking, as page authority is not endorsed by Google.

But you can draw indirect relation between page authority and ranking. This is because page authority takes account of those factors that are considered essential for SEO.

These are link building, quality content, specific keywords, and many more. 

Google has the largest database and its ranking factors are accurate whereas, Moz has its own indexing mechanism, not as large as Google, but indexes pages in it.

Therefore, a page authority score can have an effect on page ranking and SEO, as you can use it in your SEO strategy.

Its prediction, though not precise always, can help you in comparative analysis. Moreover, it can also help you in knowing the off-page SEO factors. You can immediately know where you may stand in the next few days, thus you can devise a new link-building strategy to improve your ranking.

Concluding remarks:

Owing a successful website is easier said than done because you need to keep your website at the top against your competitors. Therefore, you may need some metrics to get a broad idea of your website’s worth. For this purpose, the page authority score is a suitable one.

It is a concept developed by MOZ, a leading SEO tools provider, that tells you the likelihood of your page ranking on Google or any other search engine.

 Another way around, it doesn’t mean your pages will fall according to your PA score. But it defines an estimated value of your website in search engine’s eyes.

Knowing the PA score, you may analyze the value of your page in SERPs and can devise a link build strategy to improve your ranking. Thus, page authority can help you in many ways.